How to run a country that doesn't like you

Great article in yesterday's Globe and Mail about Angela Merkel and the upcoming German election:

She told her audience, plainly, that the German military air strike that killed an unknown number of Afghan civilians last week was one of the necessary consequences of a just war.

She was met with a chorus of boos.

Then the German Chancellor told her fellow East Germans that she, like them, had lived through communism and that they should work harder and appreciate the gains they have made and the freedoms they have earned.

Again, boos.

And they're expecting her to win this!

Awesome rhetorical skills aside, it seems that Angela Merkel's key to success is her uncanny knack for doing the precise opposite of what she says she will:

In her first years in office after her surprise 2005 election victory, Ms. Merkel angered party supporters and the media by failing to institute the sort of aggressive, Margaret Thatcher-style economic reforms she had advocated to open up the economy.

Instead, she adopted the rhetoric, and some of the policies, of her former opponents on the left: a reversal of her party's long-held view that Germany is “not a country of immigration,” an aggressive embrace of women-friendly policies on child care and maternity leaves, both novelties in Germany; and a bailout in which the state subsidized the payrolls of 1.5 million workers.

Among Germans, Ms. Merkel's more or less charisma-free, managerial style of politics is winning the day precisely because she has made it seem so similar to that of her opponents, a mirror the Social Democrats have so far failed to shatter.

Say what you will about multiparty parliamentary democracy and the general crappiness of minority governments, but it is impressive how much leaders in these situations are forced to compromise and dilute their own goals. Merkel is a right-wing leader, like Harper, who cannot, for fear of being fired, govern like a right-wing leader. In the United States, where one can receive a mandate from netting, let's say, 50.7% of the vote, a leader who abandoned that many of their original goals and policies would be seen as a flip-flopper. In Canada or Germany, they can stick around as long as they please, trapped in an airless purgatory where they struggle to please or soothe everyone who isn't safely locked into their base. We have yet another election coming up this fall (the fourth in... five years), which I will sagely predict will result in yet another conservative minority, more or less unchanged from where it is now. As much as I dislike Harper, my expectation is that his Merkel-style balancing act over the last few years, combined with Ignatieff's over-ambitious, oddly timed power grab, guarantees he'll get one last, relatively ineffectual term in office before he steps down and the Conservatives replace him. Democracy, man, what a beautiful thing.